


They talked to him with total trust that he was able to make sense of it.

by starlingale



Series: an alien mind formed by interaction with humans [2]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-17
Updated: 2018-02-17
Packaged: 2019-03-20 09:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13714824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlingale/pseuds/starlingale
Summary: His understanding was incomplete, but it was expanding wonderfully.





	They talked to him with total trust that he was able to make sense of it.

She kept talking to him in her language, with total trust that he could learn it. He was learning it fast, but still, the trust itself has warmed his heart, especially after the way his torturers had treated him as an animal. He could not use what he had picked up from their language to understand her, but her signs were precise and easy for him to imitate. Soon he knew the signs for "more learning" itself. But the more secure he become in his communication, the less urgent his need for that became. Her visits were what kept him sane, and being reminded of the existence of good things, of music and good food and the simple joy of interacting... it all took away form his time of learning. But all that mattered was crystal clear between them.

After the breakout, in which his new friends had risked their lives for his, his body healed, his mind became clearer and his heart heavier. He could hardly believe their generosity, the selflessness of their help.

Giles could both speak and sign, which was gloriously useful in connecting the dots of his understanding, and he could also draw, which had shortened the time needed for complex explanations considerably.

There were blunders. He imagined that if these people can steal eggs from birds, they are all right with eating the predators in the flat, too. He was ashamed, afterwards, of having so gravely misjudged their society, and of having hurt Giles in his panic. Their forgiveness was balm for his pain, and he was glad to be able to return that with a bit of his magic, now that he was well enough to light up. In his old life, he tried to distribute his powers equitably, avoiding to give some people unnaturally long lives at the expense of the next person coming for help, but with so few in his care, he permitted himself to give Gilles more vitality than strictly needed for a wound.

He did not get to understand everything about the world the strangers from the cold city did, and he was beginning to see the level of specialization they had achieved in their deciphering of the world. (Their number system, at least, was genius in its simplicity.) But what he needed most, for now, was communication and he indeed learned enough signs to be able to talk to them about their plans.

Living in a puddle of a bathtub was unsustainable on the long term, this much was obvious. He knew what the red markings on Eliza's calendar meant, even as learning yet another communication system was far from being his priority. Swimming away from a canal seemed both unavoidable and the final piece of his series of tragedies, the one that would complete them into a  weight heavy enough to crush him.

He loved Eliza like a lover would, which was a precious, unexpected thing that could flower only in their present situation as equals - she was not blinded by worship, he was not in chains, her familiarity with the world he was in at present was balanced by his powers and strenght. He hasn't experienced love in this form before, but the feelings of loyalty, of understanding and acceptance, were things with echoes in him. 

And he did have a sexuality - it developed mostly as a mirror image of what his people wanted to see in him, and as time passed, they have rarely managed to come up with a ritual he would consider ethical participating in -  the first time he saw terror in the human participant's eyes made him immediately retreat and remain extremely picky on that front. But Eliza was endearingly certain of herself, fierce and free of any feelings of obligation, trusting him to not push for anything unwanted, and only afraid of causing hurt to him. What they had was entirely unexpected and beautiful.

So they sat at the table, the evening before the calendar would turn red, with rich ways to communicate at their fingertips - and with everything already said and no words to make the situation any better. When he looked up from his eggs, there were tears in her beautiful eyes, her hands falling in her lap as if she had just finished dancing.

Their final triumph could not have been calculated, but it came, in the end. Eliza was alive, they slid out of the canal just in case in time of her first underwater breaths, and they knew that there was no urgency for figuring out the rest of their lives. She wanted to give a sign to her friends of her being alive, in a day or two, but other than that... They were together, in love, and they had no urgency in figuring out where and how to live. But they freedom included just not thinking about any of those things just yet. 

**Author's Note:**

> In the script, Gilles gets better skin and general rejuvenation, too! And he looks down in his pajama pants and says something like "wow".
> 
> and at the risk of sounding melodramatic: of course, we all are minds formed by interacting with other humans, so "magical being wished into existence by a group and ~raised~ by that group for generations" becomes not only a person, but boyfriend material, too.


End file.
